Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 4).djvu/362



''{325} In order to complete the description of the Mississippi, we subjoin the following, being Extracts of Notes of a voyage from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, thence by sea to Philadelphia, in the year 1799, made by a gentleman of accurate observation, a passenger in a New Orleans boat, who has been polite enough to grant us his manuscript for this purpose. Mr. Cuming having stopped at the Bayau Pierre, we commence this narrative a little above that river, in order to shew the state of the settlements of the country at that time.''

February 9. This evening we made a good landing on the Spanish shore, with the river even with the top of the bank. When we had got our boat tied to a tree, I took a walk on the shore, and found it covered with herbs, briers, blackberries and oak trees, all in leaf. I measured the leaf of a sycamore tree and it was twenty inches over. The evening was calm and clear, but the air rather cool, the new moon looked beautiful.

Feb. 10. We proceeded early and got ten miles before sunrise. At half past one o'clock we came to a part of the river where some little time before there had been a hurricane; it overspread an extent of about half a mile in breadth, and crossed the river in two places about one league apart. The tops of the trees had been twisted off, others torn up by the roots and hurled into the river, some lying with their roots above the bank, and their tops in the river. The route it had taken was clearly perceptible, and how far it extended on each hand. Its appearance was like the wreck of creation, or the subsiding of some general deluge. Over this whole extent there was not the least vestige of a tree left, the deserted stumps excepted. At four o'clock, after taking a circuitous {326} route in a very long bend of the river, the vestiges of this hurricane again appeared. It had